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Sunday, May 29, 2011

A NOID

A customer came in to the nursery the other day with a bagful of plants to ID. I really enjoy doing that, especially when there are some that take me a while to figure out. And REALLY especially when one stumps me and everyone else at the store.

Here's one of those. Anyone have any idea what it is? The customers said it had purple blooms that looked kind of like tiny orchid blooms. That made me think some kind of long-leaved cenizo (Leucophylluim species), so I looked it up. They said the blooms looked a lot like those, but I couldn't find a long-leaved cenizo that matched it.

It smells heavenly ~ just like a curry plant. The leaves are quite hairy with soft, white "fur" on them. Reminds me of a wooly stemodia, only this "wool" is a lot softer and prettier. Many of us thought white sage or sage brush, but the stems are in no way square. I also thought some sort of artemesia, but I couldn't find any sort that wasn't yellow-flowered.

They said it gets about a foot and a half tall and comes up all over their plot of land, growing like a weed even with absolutely no care from them.

Someone at the nursery did say they've seen it before somewhere else, best they could remember it was growing in a weedy-native-plant type setting. I checked out the Wildflower Center's website, but no dice.

2 comments:

We thought of that, but like I put in the post, the stems aren't square, something very different from almost all other sages (salvias) we looked at, and the blooms didn't match any other non-salvia-genus sages we could think of. If you think sage, which one (genus and species if you can)?